Application performance management and WAN acceleration are hard problems to solve and are part of a market segment loaded with vendor mythology from players like Cisco, Riverbed, Blue Coat, Sliver Peak Systems and others. Recently Dr. Jim Metzler was the guest for a live Network World chat. Widely known as one of the industry’s foremost gurus of WAN acceleration, Jim is also a sought-after speaker and consultant. He has logged over 28 years of experience with network technology and its business applications. Jim is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, co-author of Network World’s Wide Area Networking newsletter, and the moderator for the Network & Application Acceleration track at Network World’s traveling event, IT Roadmap. Here is a portion of the chat transcript. The full transcriptcan be found here.
%20www.tredent.com: Jim, can you explain what you mean when you referred to different approaches by the vendors and that BlueCoat is using the security angle?
Jim_Metzler: Sure – Blue Coat will focus on security and a deep understanding of applications. Riverbed is moving into applying similar technology to what they currently have in the storage space. Foundry comes from a great knowledge of networking and is moving into applications. One of F5’s strengths is their knowledge of applications, but they do not have a background in networking. Cisco is the networking leader and always focuses on how their WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) integrate well with the network. Citrix has a broad range of solutions that focus on application delivery – starting with their core presentation server. It is also worth remembering the Citrix is basically a software company and many of their competitors are basically hardware companies. The bottom line to all of this is that I don’t see this market becoming a commodity any time soon.
Stefan Gasteiger: Jim, I’m not deep into WAN acceleration, but how does it fit into scenarios with heavy ICA traffic or Notes replication traffic?
Jim_Metzler: WAN acceleration is a very broad topic. Some applications (CIFS traffic that results from server consolidation) scream out for optimization. Other traffic (VoIP) requires QoS so that other traffic (bulk file transfers) do not interfere with it. The bottom line is that there are differing traffic types and they often require differing techniques.
enric: Are today’s WOC players fitting the real customers demands? And how are the service providers approaching this?
Jim_Metzler: This is also a multi-faceted question. I believe that the WOC players are filling real needs today. I say that in part because the deployment of these appliances is on the upswing. The question about service providers is fascinating. I believe that there is a role for service providers. For example, Akamai offers an Internet overlay service today to make the Internet perform more like a private WAN.
Others services providers (Orange) will basically install and manage WOCs on your premise. I think the service providers who win in this space offer a range of planning and design services and who also develop a deep understanding of the key applications (SharePoint, SAP, Oracle) and understand how to best optimize them.
Want to join in our next chat? A list of upcoming chats can be found here.
